Chicken wire consists of a hexagonal lattice of wires. This structure exists naturally in the form of graphite, where each sheet of graphene resembles chicken wire, with strong covalent carbon bonds. Tubular graphene sheets have been synthesised; these are known as carbon nanotubes. They have many potential applications, due to their high tensile strength and electrical properties.

The densest circle packing is arranged like the hexagons in this tiling

The hexagonal tiling appears in many crystals. In three dimensions, the face-centered cubic and hexagonal close packing are common crystal structures. They are the densest known sphere packings in three dimensions, and are believed to be optimal. Structurally, they comprise parallel layers of hexagonal tilings, similar to the structure of graphite. They differ in the way that the layers are staggered from each other, with the face-centered cubic being the more regular of the two. Pure copper, amongst other materials, forms a face-centered cubic lattice.

There are 3 distinct uniform colorings of a hexagonal tiling, all generated from reflective symmetry of Wythoff constructions. The (h,k) represent the periodic repeat of one colored tile, counting hexagonal distances as h first, and k second.

A chamferred hexagonal tiling replacing edges with new hexagons and transforms into another hexagonal tiling. In the limit, the original faces disappear, and the new hexagons degenerate into rhombi, and it becomes a rhombic tiling.

This tiling is topologically related as a part of sequence of regular tilings with hexagonal faces, starting with the hexagonal tiling, with Schläfli symbol {6,n}, and Coxeter diagram, progressing to infinity.

This tiling is also a part of a sequence of truncated rhombic polyhedra and tilings with [n,3] Coxeter group symmetry. The cube can be seen as a rhombic hexahedron where the rhombi are squares. The truncated forms have regular n-gons at the truncated vertices, and nonregular hexagonal faces. The sequence has two vertex figures (n.6.6) and (6,6,6).

The hexagonal tiling can be considered an elongated rhombic tiling, where each vertex of the rhombic tiling is stretched into a new edge. This is similar to the relation of the rhombic dodecahedron and the rhombo-hexagonal dodecahedron tessellations in 3 dimensions.

Drawing the tiles colored as red on the original faces, yellow at the original vertices, and blue along the original edges, there are 8 forms, 7 which are topologically distinct. (The truncated triangular tiling is topologically identical to the hexagonal tiling.)

Hexagonal tilings can be made with the identical {6,3} topology as the regular tiling (3 hexagons around every vertex). With identical faces (face-transitivity) and vertex-transitivity, there are 12 variations, with the first 7 identified as quadrilaterals that don't connect edge-to-edge, or as hexagons with two pairs of colinear edges. Symmetry given assumes all faces are the same color.[1]

It can also be distorted into a chiral 4-colored tri-directional weaved pattern, distorting some hexagons into parallelograms. The weaved pattern with 4-colored faces have rotational 632 (p6) symmetry.

The hexagonal tiling can be used as a circle packing, placing equal diameter circles at the center of every point. Every circle is in contact with 3 other circles in the packing (kissing number). The gap inside each hexagon allows for one circle, creating the densest packing from the triangular tiling#circle packing, with each circle contact with the maximum of 6 circles.